The Smallest Capital in the World Is...

Thanks to these Pacific Islanders, the sun has yet to set on the British Empire.

The mutiny on the HMS Bounty is one of the most beloved tales in the history of seafaring. More than two centuries after the original mutiny, and eighty years after it became a bestselling novel and Oscar-winning film, we still remember the struggle of wills between the dictatorial Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton/Trevor Howard/Anthony Hopkins!) and the rebellious young Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable/Marlon Brando/Mel Gibson)! But for the residents of one island chain in the South Pacific, the Bounty story isn't just a ripping tale of the sea. On Pitcairn Island, it's a life-and-death legacy.

The mutiny was only the beginning of the story.

After the mutineers took the Bounty, about half the crew stayed loyal to Captain Bligh, so 20 men were abandoned with Bligh on the empty sea in a longboat. Amazingly, they managed to row four thousand miles to Dutch Indonesia without losing a man. Christian, meanwhile, took the Bounty back to Tahiti, where he gathered natives to join him in colonizing a new island, tricking some and kidnapping others. Many of the Tahitians who Christian wrangled were women. Needless to say, the allure of Polynesian women to the Bounty crew looms large in the mutiny story.

Woman have been voting on Pitcairn longer than any other place on earth.

After months of wandering, the nine remaining mutineers and their companions discovered Pitcairn Island. They burned the famous ship, and parts of its wreckage can still be seen by divers in Pitcairn's Bounty Bay. The island became a British colony in 1838, long after Fletcher Christian's death. The same year, women on Pitcairn—including some of the same ones who'd been kidnapped in 1789—were given the right to vote for the island's council, long before any European women received full suffrage.

No one wants to live on Pitcairn Island.

Pitcairn's population never rose above 250, and today there are only 56 people there, making it the smallest jurisdiction on Earth. Most are descendants of the mutineers, and many are still named Christian. All of them live in the tiny capital city of Adamstown (the smallest on Earth, naturally), which boasts a post office, a general store, a café, and... that's about it. There's no airstrip, so the only way to get to Pitcairn is an expensive and arduous 36-hour boat ride from Tahiti. The Pitcairners, in desperate need of new blood, have offered free land to new settlers looking for a South Seas paradise, but so far there's been only one application.

Thanks to Pitcairn, the sun never set on the British Empire.

Pitcairn Island is one of the most remote bits of British overseas territory, the remnants of a 19th-century empire so vast that, famously, the sun never set upon it. In cartoonist Randall Munroe's webcomic What If?, he tackles the question of when—that is, on what date—the sun finally set on the British Empire. By Munroe's math, Pitcairn Island has been singlehandedly keeping Britain's day going for two hundred years! Every night when the sun goes down in the Cayman Islands, there's an hour of darkness before it rises over Diego Garcia. And for that hour, Pitcairn is the only part of the queen's realm still in daylight. If there's ever a total solar eclipse over Pitcairn, at a time when the sun isn't shining over the Atlantic as well, then it's game over, Your Majesty.

Explore the world's oddities every week with Ken Jennings, and check out his book Maphead for more geography trivia.